We shouldn't be surprised by Australian republicanism, argues David Corson, it is what you would expect from a country with such a strong egalitarian culture. In a 1978 poll, Australians were asked their opinion on the monarchy. The majority of those under 35 wanted the monarchy to end and Australia to become a republic. Those young Australians are now the under 50s, and the many older folk who preferred to retain a monarchy are a dwindling minority. This is the main reason why it is reasonable to say that Australia will sever its ties to the monarchy before too long.
Against this background Paul Keating's move to end the monarchy after 2000 is no surprise. Regardless of fluctuations in opinion polls, the trend towards a republic in Australia seems clear. Keating is a pragmatic politician implementing what his constituency will increasingly want, as older voters are replaced by the more republican-minded young.
Clearly the unhappy marital affairs of the House of Windsor set the backdrop to Keating's manoeuvres. But his moves are no more than the last acts of an historical process that has little to do with sudden Australian disenchantment with the humbug of monarchy. The misdemeanours of the young royals are only a symptom of a fading institution that has lost its way and relevance.
Most Australians would likely admit that they have been well served by the present monarch and her predecessor, who have carried out their duties unexceptionally. Australians too seem only faintly alarmed by the prospect of a Charles III whose main wish, as reported, is to be his mistress's tampon. It is the institution of the monarchy itself that Australians have been slowly recoiling from over two generations. But even this growing rejection has its roots two centuries ago, at a time when the cultural character of Australians was moulded.
Unlike Australia, the dominant cultural character of anglophone Canada and pakeha New Zealand was shaped by free immigrants: the youngest sons of minor aristocrats and gentry; retired army officers; struggling crofters; and failed or adventurous tradespeople. The values that these people brought were those of the lower middle classes, which were modelled on those of their "betters" in the vague hope that this would cement their place within the dominant classes. Traditional systems like monarchies appeal to such people, and they make a virtue of resisting changes.
The dominant cultural character of all the Australian states, except South Australia, was shaped by different values. For 80 years convicts were transported to the five colonies, which were in effect British open prisons. Some 160,000 arrived and tended to stay after emancipation. They, along with the ordinary soldiers set to guard them, gave the country an anti-authoritarian bias right from the start.
Observers focus on the obvious fact that most of the convicts were common criminals: poor people snatched from urban or rural squalor, spared capital punishment because of the relative pettiness of their crimes. Less well known is that a large and influential minority were civil libertarians and dissenters, including Britain's first trade unionists, punished for "unlawful assembly" in places like Tolpuddle and south Wales. There were also tens of thousands of freedom-fighters: Irish and Scottish rebels, captured in skirmishes with the crown; Maori warriors, taken in the Land Wars; Canadian rebels; South African Boers; and other dissidents of every kind. This powerful human cocktail was stirred by the guards themselves. Like "other ranks" everywhere, they were not much different from the convicts in class origin and anti-authoritarian attitudes.
Young Australians began to see through the monarchy when they visited "the old country" in numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than seeing the monarchy from afar, as a superficially benign system, they were able to see first-hand how the monarchy sits astride and justifies an unjust and class-ridden social system. They saw that Britain had methods for distributing social benefits and burdens that were different from the more egalitarian social values that many of their exiled ancestors had struggled to develop in Australia.
This essentially working-class set of values made modern Australia very different from other countries. The cult of egalitarianism is one of the abiding myths of Australia. To outsiders, Australians often seem ready to sacrifice key freedoms to preserve a veneer of equality and this translates into social practices that are not found elsewhere to the same extent. It is no accident that Sydney was voted the most friendly city in the world in an international travel poll in September 1993. For Australians, friendliness expresses equality. They tend to treat people as equals, and go on doing so even when they should have good grounds for doing otherwise. Many are egalitarian to a fault: "unruly and wild" as Canadians often regard them; or "lacking discretion and self-control" which is the more common British stereotype. So in this preferred social climate of no hierarchies, or invisible hierarchies at best, the monarchy was always living on borrowed time.
One event of enduring significance for the monarchy was the perceived misuse of the lives of Australia's expeditionary force by the British command at Gallipoli in 1915. Australians who lived through that period looked back on the event as a glorious moment in the blooding of a young country. Yet lingering resentment at the slaughter of so many, to provide a diversion from the main event in Europe, seems gradually to have affected the way Australians perceive the British link. When Australian films began to picture the country's history in a culturally independent way, they inevitably fastened on the drama that lay in the great stories of perceived British betrayal like Gallipoli, or in the smaller, equally poignant episodes like Breaker Morant. The theme has been played over and again in Australian film and television dramas, where the British command, in places like Singapore and El Alamein, have been cast as worse villains than the nominal enemy itself.
The theme of British betrayal has hardened into a cultural ideology that is larger than the reality it draws upon. In its wake, it helps capsize respect for that singular institution of Britishness that the monarchy represents. The monarchical link is now portrayed as a folly by Keating: a folly best evidenced by the British action in "treacherously" retaining the Australian divisions in North Africa, rather than letting them go home to hold the country against the Japanese.
The catalyst for change was the coup d'etat in Canberra in 1975, when the queen's representative, the governor general, dismissed an elected government which many Australians believed had provided the most reforming moment in the country's history. Even here though, it was not just meddling by Britain that irritated. What worried many was perceived involvement in the dismissal by another foreign power, the United States.
Three issues brought Australia's left-leaning government to the critical attention of America: the strong but minority opposition in the cabinet to the likely Indonesian annexation of East Timor, which America was promoting; an ambivalent warning given by Gough Whitlam that his government might not renew the leases on America's three tracking-system bases, including the key facility in America's global satellite surveillance and weapons system; and the strong support in the Labor Party and government for keeping Australia's huge uranium reserves in the ground.
After the dismissal, the republican movement was nourished by the many stories and some facts circulated about foreign involvement in discrediting the Whitlam government. Concerns about cultural and political independence fuelled the republican cause, whose actions became a reaction to any hint of foreign intervention in Australia.
So the abolition of the monarchy in Australia is not a response to the activities of the young royals shaming their dynasty. The abolition of the monarchy has been coming for a long time.
David Corson, an Australian, is professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto. He has also taught at universities and lived in New Zealand and England.